Bach at Bethlehem

At Bethlehem, Pa., in the noble Lehigh Valley, townsfolk turned out and Eastern music lovers poured in last week for the 32nd annual Bach Festival. To sing some of the greatest devotional music known to man, 143 housewives donned white dresses, 83 workmen put on their Sunday best and sat soberly together in the chancel of Lehigh University's Packer Chapel. As usual the audience overflowed comfortably on the lawn outside; as usual the opening chorale was bayed from the belfry by 16 sonorous trombones.

The Bethlehem Bach Choir dates from 1898. Its founder was a rapt, indefatigable German-American named J. Fred Wolle who slaved for two years to train local steelworkers and shopkeepers for their first public performance in 1900 of Bach's prodigious B Minor Mass. He conducted every Festival thereafter until his death in 1933, achieved such marvels of choral attack and expression that Bethlehem became almost as famous for singing as for steel. Guarantors who helped him with the annual Festival included Bethlehem Steel's Chairman Charles M. Schwab.

After 1933, Director Bruce Carey had the undertow of Founder Wolle's death to fight against, and had to do his directing as a part-time commuting job. Whether justified or not, there were rumors of a decline in the choir's quality. Last summer the guarantors appointed a full-time resident director--black-haired, bespectacled Ifor Jones, 39, a Welsh-born organist and choir master.

For new Director Jones, big test of the two-day festival was the five-hour B Minor Mass. Composed about 1738, when Johann Sebastian Bach was in the plenitude of his powers, it is the only Catholic mass written by the Lutheran composer.* Bach chose the form because its complexity gave adequate play to his technical resources and expression to his love of God. For many years performed nowhere in the U. S. but at Bethlehem, it is now an annual climax to other choir seasons, is perhaps the most famous liturgical choral work in existence.

From the opening crash of the Kyrie to the contrapuntal splendors of the Sanctus and the flowing tranquillity of the Agnus Dei, choir, soloists and instrumentalists did themselves proud last week, mightily impressed visiting critics with the musical authority of Director Jones. As for Ifor Jones, he has made no secret of his ambition to do in Bethlehem what Leopold Stokowski did in Philadelphia. Stokowski was also a church organist before he took over the Philadelphia Orchestra in 1912.

*The ordinary of the Roman Catholic Mass consists of five parts: the Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus and Agnus Dei. The Lutheran service uses only the first two.

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